Editorials
EDITORIALS: INCIVILITY ABOUT CIVIL DEFENSE IF YOU DON'T think about it too deeply, the idea of a civil defense program makes some sense. Not that thinking about it hasn't produced its own share of...
...Anti-religious efforts in education, it noted, are being stepped up...
...All this, when experts on the subject say that such a war would mean the end of civilization as we know it...
...That would be true civil defense, the only rational kind of civil defense open to us...
...It is this final, unresolved episode that makes it particularly hard to reflect with perspective on "the Cody years...
...The number of seminary students has been strictly limited...
...There is no civil defense against Armageddon, and that is the hard truth...
...From there to Benvenuto Cellini's exuberant celebration of solar selfhood in the Renaissance, it was but a short step...
...Is God to be forgiven...
...As sixteenth century mystics already understood, the divine comedy of our time lies elsewhere than in solar heroics...
...and then, after cataloguing the wrongs he had suffered, he added, "But God will not so forgive...
...Michael McCauley reports the view of one Chicago sympathizer, "He's an old man and he ought to go to God in peace...
...Yet, since the seventeenth century, it's been de rigueur that Western authors take the part of Job against the Big Sky Boss, who hangs out, as in J.B., on a ladder above stage...
...Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top," he advised in the interview...
...PRAGUE ADDENDUM Despite the "systematic destruction" of the Czechoslovak dissident movement, reported in this issue by Robert D. Kaplan, in March Chartef 77 managed to issue two statements supporting religious freedom and protesting attacks on the church...
...One U.S...
...A brief history of consciousness helps to see the point...
...The message may not get through to the Soviet people but at least it will reach the Soviet government: mat the prospects for backing away from nuclear suicide are dim unless both sides are resolved to back away together...
...Life, and Disarmament...
...Both sides mount several warheads on a single missile, and each warhead can be guided to a separate target...
...Jung recognized, it's the kind of question that arises inevitably if you're saddled with a Big Boss Jehovah...
...it was in type, and we have let it stand without change...
...missile, for example, could deliver the equivalent of about twenty-two Hiroshima bombs on each of three different Soviet cities...
...But this drama has grown tiresome, histrionic...
...The civil defense plans of the Reagan administration represent one more effort in a disturbing series of such efforts to suggest that nuclear war is well within the range of rational possibilities...
...So where's the idolatry in J.B.I On rereading today, it seems less the Big Boss who cows-a setup if ever there was one-than that sunny naif, the pre-lapsarian American Adam, J.B...
...As Senators Edward Kennedy and Mark O. Hatfield note in their new paperback, Freeze, How You Can Help Prevent Nuclear War, a common U.S...
...So he ought to have, so ought all of us...
...The Soviet Union has greeted those campaigns with encouragement, but it will not allow even the most innocuous of peace messages to reach its population through channels not subject to government control...
...Some U.S...
...urban casualties would amount to 98 percent...
...Given the awful power of nuclear weapons, this is obvious foolishness, but the kind of foolishness that is not the least bit laughable...
...Any accusations against the shepherd also are against the church," he said...
...a country that has learned . . . how fatal preferential treatment...
...Then, believe it or not...
...The weekly Catholic newspaper is an instrument of state propaganda...
...The government allowed publication of only one theological work and one hymnal in 1981...
...plainclothesmen to pounce instantly on seven demonstrators and the banner they unfurled in Moscow's Red Square...
...warheads go as high as 9 megatons, equal to 600 Hiroshimas, and Senators Kennedy and Hatfield report that the Soviets have even tested a 50-megaton warhead, equal to 3300 Hiroshimas...
...Every , demonstration of discontent with American and NATO policy-and may there be many...
...hydrogen bomb tested at Bikini Atoll was a 15-megaton device, equivalent to 15 million tons of TNT-a thousand times the size of the Hiroshima bomb...
...But let Thomas K. Jones...
...I wish to let everyone know that I have forgiven my enemies," he wrote...
...We'll see where we are...
...This does not mean, as some defenders of established Western arms policies have suggested, that the anti-nuclear campaigns are doing more harm than good...
...It lasted less than two minutes...
...but it's not a bad statement to turn us back inside the prison-body, for Plato the cave of illusions, for us the place where the hidden God waits...
...Charter 77 listed five priests and four laymen recently sentenced to jail for religious activities, one brutal beating, and two mysterious suicides of practicing believers...
...LIGHT AND SHADOW On the night of April 20, Archibald MacLeish died in his eighty-ninth year...
...Blow on the coal of the heart And we'll see by and by...
...In an interview in the Los Angeles Times, Mr...
...The fantastic assumption:,that if the Soviets chose to attack us, we would have a full week to lay in a stock of groceries and get into our cars to drive to some quiet place away from the bombs-no mention of the fallout that would follow...
...The latter statement is true, but the former is not...
...Jones and his three feet of dirt to the contrary, the chance for national survival and recovery in an all-out nuclear war are nil...
...But even aside from such bizarre cultural side-effects, when you do seriously think about it, the idea of large-scale civil defense against nuclear war is preposterous...
...At present the United States has 9400 warheads ready for delivery...
...The incident underlines the difficulties facing the European and American anti-nuclear campaigns...
...And Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York issued scores of thousands of booklets telling residents of the state exactly how to construct an air raid shelter in their backyards...
...in order for man to live...
...And as for the Under Secretary Jones, we suggest he find a new line of work...
...And that is just one missile...
...it is also starred with accusations made out of love and a concern for the church's well-being...
...Urban areas, the best estimate is that U.S...
...centuries-old tradition of respect for personal beliefs...
...As if to outwit solar high-flyers, bring them back to earth...
...Some of the Russian SS-18 missiles carry not three but ten 1-megaton warheads, so that just one Soviet missile could deliver to ten American cities the explosive power of 67 Hiroshima bombs each...
...he came late in life to reflect on the mystery of evil...
...ZERO IN MOSCOW Ground Zero Week came to the Soviet Union on April 19...
...Our gods have gone to sleep, and they only stir in the bowels of the earth," wrote Jung...
...In short, each side has the ability to inflict hundreds of thousands of Hiroshimas on the other, to lay waste the other's entire land...
...Cardinal Cody admitted that he had few friends...
...Archibald MacLeish almost caught the sense of this in those last words he gave, not to J.B., but to the wife Sarah: The lights have gone out in the sky...
...Today atomic bombs are used to trigger hydrogen bombs...
...The history of the church is rife with accusations made out of destructive intent...
...In his last illness he wrote a letter forgiving his critics-but made it sound like a further accusation...
...Religious freedom ought to be especially valued by Czechoslovakia, said one Charter 77 statement, "a country with a...
...Others insisted that, by and large, the newspaper had performed a journalistic service...
...What was the subversive message that caused the K.G.B...
...The theory behind the Reagan civil defense scheme: that with such planning (provided, of course, that the Soviet Union gives us a week's notice) the United States could fully recover from an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union in two to four years...
...it was only much later that someone remembered that in New York City, the most populous city in the state, millions of people had no backyards in the first place...
...have comparable power...
...The leaflets called on the Soviet government to shift spending from arms to food aid...
...asks furious Mr...
...It does mean that those elements of the peace movement who are truly convinced that bilateral disarmament is the only likely disarmament will have to make their position dramatically clear...
...it is criminal of the administration to suggest otherwise...
...We suspect that in his last painful months he discovered he had more than he knew...
...accompanied by a relentless suppression of others, can be...
...CARDINAL CODY, RIP...
...We question the "only" here...
...Many Chicagoans we respect, who had never been hesitant to criticize Cardinal Cody's actions when they thought criticism was in order, believed that the Chicago Sun-Times was guilty of egregious sensationalism and character assassination in its presentation of the charges that Cody had turned church funds to personal purposes...
...A quintessentially modern question...
...It's the dirt that does it...
...Soviet missiles aimed at the U.S...
...Ponder: In the ancient world of Athens and Jerusalem, Zeus/Jehovah was a solar deity, identified with the work of literacy, raising tribal man out of the "temples dim" of pantheism and Plato's dark cave...
...The keynote of idolatry is contentment with the prevalent gods...
...Not that thinking about it hasn't produced its own share of madness in the past...
...seized before they could be distributed...
...The U.S...
...Courts have even interpreted the law in such a way that religious discussion or praying in a private home could be considered a criminal offense...
...He stands before my former enemies insisting forever with good will that they change...
...must be matched by equally vigorous and visible demonstrations outside Soviet embassies, consulates, travel bureaus, etc...
...But ponder this irony too: that just when Cellini was heralding the birth of the modern self, Luther was having dark doubts of the enterprise, and John of the Cross was discovering that from soul's vantage God had moved-into the soul's Dark Night...
...Like the quintessential American he was...
...And in the history of Israelite religion, the Book of Job represents a classic of this genre, iconoclasm at its best...
...after the cities of America have been leveled by blasts that would make Hiroshima look pale and after deadly radiation has spread over the land, we would all troop back into the cities where we came from...
...If the Soviet Union used only 2000 of its warheads to attack U.S...
...Set up this way, J.B...
...The banner read "Bread...
...Zuss in J.B...
...Jones's shovels...
...himself...
...On the day before this issue of Commonweal was scheduled to go to press, we learned of the death of John Patrick Cardinal Cody, the archbishop of Chicago...
...Michael F. McCauley's overview of the controversies Cody stirred was written several weeks ago...
...Both groups were agreed that the matter had to be dealt with in a more open fashion than the archdiocese seemed willing to allow...
...A call to Congress to allocate $4.2 billion over seven years on a civil defense program designed to relocate in emergency two-thirds of the population, evacuating all cities with a population over 50,000...
...Now he is gone where he needs only One...
...Both figures do not include approximately 30,000 nuclear warheads deployed for intermediate range use or for tactical use on the battlefield...
...Instead of appropriating the money requested for Mr...
...Cardinal Cody was not an easy man to understand or, at least at this distance, to like...
...As C.G...
...the Soviet has 7500...
...territory...
...The cardinal's declared attitude, and that of some of his supporters, was unfortunately one that dismissed all criticism of church leaders...
...Congress should insist that President Reagan begin really serious negotiations with the Soviets-negotiations aimed at stopping and then reversing the nuclear arms race which now threatens humanity's very survival...
...Consider: the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima was a 15-kiloton weapon-that is, it had the explosive equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT...
...When some people wish to strike an organization, they first attack it through its shepherd...
...is bound to appear the aggrieved party, morally superior to a bullying God: the King must die (Long live the King...
...What is the newest response of the Reagan administration to this...
...And what was the dangerous appeal contained in the leaflets the K.G.B...
...But "peace," it seemed (again, from a distance), was never John Patrick Cody's natural element, and the lack of peace that characterized his final months was not completely the responsibility of others...
...So the pressures exerted on East and West are distinctly asymmetrical...
...The last time we went through this, for instance, a Jesuit scholar pondered the matter and then, writing in America magazine, solemnly proclaimed that it was morally quite permissible for a shelter-owner to shoot down a non-shelter-owner who tried to intrude on his turf-a sort of Cold War fable of the grasshopper and the ant, we guess...
...for a single ideology...
...The progress of religion," observed Whitehead, "is defined by the denunciation of the gods...
...Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for strategic theater nuclear forces present the Reagan case...
...If you believe that, maybe you would also believe that in the event of a warning of imminent nuclear attack, plans for at least one metropolis call for citizens with odd-numbered license plates to stand aside and let those with even-numbered plates evacuate the city first...
...One way to do so is to take advantage of the fact that not all representative symbols of the Soviet government lie within K.G.B...
...Jones said: "Everybody's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around...
...or Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile carries a 1-megaton warhead, containing the explosive power of one million tons of TNT, or 67 Hiroshima bombs...
Vol. 109 • May 1982 • No. 9
